Honest Abe's demons

November 27, 2005|JIM HIGGINS Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Abraham Lincoln, possibly America's greatest president, would be unelectable today for many reasons: his homely looks, his piping voice, his lack of access to big money. And yes, his sober, even gloomy, mien would be jarringly untelegenic in an age when presidents are expected to radiate confidence and manly optimism. In "Lincoln's Melancholy," writer and independent scholar Joshua Wolf Shenk labors mightily to recover the context and value of Lincoln's mental and emotional suffering for contemporary readers. Just as Lincoln is widely seen today as a self-made man in education and politics, Shenk also sees him as self-made psychologically and spiritually through his lifelong grapple with depression and melancholia. Shenk might have called the book "Lincoln's Search for Meaning," after Viktor Frankl's work; Frankl is among the dozens of writers and thinkers on depression, mental illness, suffering and dread that Shenk enlists here. Shenk probes the causes and Lincoln's response to specific major depressions, including breakdowns and suicidal thoughts; the future president's tendency to depression; and, most fascinating for contemporary readers, Lincoln's melancholy temperament. To cope with his demons, Lincoln relied on homely but effective tools. He wrote and recited poetry: His verse was sometimes gloomy enough to please a Goth. He read humor and told jokes, even through the lowest ebbs of the Civil War. He worked hard. He was not conventionally religious -- Shenk calls him a freethinker -- but he was a seeker, and he came to be both moved and consoled by his growing belief that he had a mission on earth. Shenk's study is a detailed examination of one facet of the Lincoln diamond. This shouldn't be the first or even second book that anyone reads about Lincoln. A good biography and a grounding in Lincoln's own words (he's the best writer of America's presidents) should come first. It's also an exercise in historiography. Shenk believes Lincoln's contemporaries had an accurate picture of his temperament and insight into his most intensive depressive episodes. He says that later historians discounted or pushed that material aside.